Free Just Kids From the Bronx by Arlene Alda Page B

for independence.
    In between my bouts of discontent were long periods of happiness. My friends were important to me, as were my babysitting jobs, which paid enough so that I could buy whatever a few carefully saved dollars could buy. I had also started taking clarinet lessons, an instrument I wanted desperately to play. Some of the more nosy neighbors would challenge me with their usual prying. “A girl playing the clarinet?” That always bothered me, but not enough to stop my working toward the goal of becoming a professional clarinetist. My teenage years were spent being in love with my instrument, my high school, my new friends there, and the freedom I had to travel to different parts of the city. That included going with my sister and her friends or just hanging out with mine. It was during those high school years that I started to go to concerts at Carnegie Hall. My horizon was expanding and I loved it.
    Eventually my brother Harry married Norma, who lived in our building, and my sister Shirley married Carl, who lived in our neighborhood. The arguments between my parents petered out, coinciding with my father’s early retirement. By then I was totally consumed with the clarinet. The sound of the sewing machine became a distant background hum to my incessant practicing on the instrument, which, by the way, neither parent, both infinitely patient with me, ever complained about.
    By the time I was in college the sewing machine had been moved from the dinette into the one bedroom, which my parents had reclaimed from Shirley, Harry, and me. The dinette, with a narrow cot pushed against one of its walls, became my bedroom. There was an eerie quiet in the apartment when I became the only child left there. I especially missed my sister, because I forgot to mention that I was a tag-along kid. Where Shirley went, I wanted to go, and most times did. By the time I was in high school we were the best of friends. When she married I felt a deep loneliness, but by then I was already in college, fulfilling my mother’s immigrant wishes without realizing it. “This is America. Your life can be better than mine.”

 
    MICHAEL BRESCIA

    Physician, cofounder and executive medical director of Calvary Hospital in the Bronx
    (1933– )
    We had a four-room apartment in a walk-up building. My three sisters, believe it or not, slept in one of the two bedrooms, in one bed. My parents had the other bedroom. I slept in the living room on what’s called in Italian a branda , a foldout bed, that was kept in the closet when it wasn’t used. It was great when one of my sisters got married because then there were only two sisters at home, but I still didn’t get a bedroom. At times there’d be conversations going on around me or my sisters would be entertaining their boyfriends on the sofa in the living room, while I’d be lying on my branda in the middle of the room.
    The insulation in that room was bad. It was freezing in the winter, and we had no blankets to speak of. My father would put his heavy coat on top of me when he came home from work. That was my blanket. Other than that, there was only like leftover cloth and stuff that my grandmother brought over on the boat from Italy. The bedsheet was made from sacks that originally held rice that they stitched together. This was about as comfortable as sandpaper. I would’ve frozen to death if my father hadn’t given me his coat.
    But I had no negative feelings because I didn’t even imagine how others might’ve slept. I felt very loved. My three sisters spoiled me as much as you could spoil any kid in the Bronx. I was this little prince when I was born, and to this day I’m very spoiled. When my dad was up in the morning, I could smell the coffee brewing even before I got out of bed. That was such a wonderful smell. Such a wonderful memory. There just was no room. We were stuffed into that apartment.
    My dad was an extremely wonderful guy. He had no education, but he was determined to